“We need to get some broad based support,
to capture the public’s imagination…
So we have to offer up scary scenarios,make simplified, dramatic statements
and make little mention of any doubts…
Each of us has to decide what the right balance
is between being effective and being honest.”
– Prof. Stephen Schneider,
Stanford Professor of Climatology,
lead author of many IPCC reports

“The data doesn’t matter. We’re not basing our recommendations
on the data. We’re basing them on the climate models.”
– Prof. Chris Folland,
Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research

“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue.
Even if the theory of global warming is wrong,
we will be doing the right thing in terms of
economic and environmental policy.”
– Timothy Wirth,
President of the UN Foundation

•••

It’s official, the past 12 months have been the hottest in Australia for more than a hundred years.

Temperatures averaged across Australia between September 2012 and August 2013 were hotter than any year since good records began in 1910. The previous record was held by the 12-month period from February 2005 to January 2006.

The new record follows a suite of broken records following last year’s “angry summer”, including the hottest summer since records began.

The Climate Commission was setup by the Australian Labor Government in 2011 as an ‘independent’ body communicating on climate change. Rather than behaving independently, it has acted as a literal climate propaganda unit to promote the Governments sweeping climate reform agenda, with the controversial carbon (dioxide) tax as it’s centrepiece.

In the Sydney Morning Herald article, Karoly and Lewis claim “It’s official, the past 12 months have been the hottest in Australia for more than a hundred years.” and “The link between global warming and human causes has been firmly established over the last two decades.”

What’s immediately telling in Karoly, Lewis and the Climate Commission’s work is the lack of any reference to satellite temperature data, which would be pertinent to assessing Australia’s short and long-term climatic trends.

See for yourself

Use the ‘find’ function in your browser (ctrl F) and see if you can find a reference to “satellite” or “UAH” temperature in Karoly and Lewis’ pal-reviewed study or the Climate Commission’s report:

There is a perfectly good reason why Karoly, Lewis and the Climate Commission do not include satellite data in any of their reporting ~ because the data does not fit their alarmist ‘extreme’ heat narrative. In fact the satellite data shows a trend in the opposite direction.

The latest UAH satellite temperature dataset shows Australia’s near surface temperature (0-5km) has been cooling at -0.927°C per decade over the last 5 years and cooling at -0.291°C per decade over the last 10 years.

UAH satellite data below from John Christy, University of Alabama at Huntsville shows no rise in land or ocean temperature for the Southern Hemisphere region and no rise in Australia’s mean temperature since the beginning of the century:

The Climate Commissions reported “Angry Summer” was in fact not-so-angry or unusual at all. UAH satellite data shows in fact the 2012/13 mean summer temperature was in fact cooler than when satellite measurements began in 1979:

Both satellite datasets agree that there was nothing at all unusual about the 2012 summer. Did Karoly and the Climate Commission researches notice this fact? Or perhaps they just thought it wasn’t important for their report?

The peer reviewed, comprehensive, Lewis and Karoly paper does not contain the words “satellite”, or “UAH”. Lewis and Karoly apparently do not know about the UAH satellite program yet, otherwise they surely would have emailed John Christy or Roy Spencer (as we did) to ask for the data. We can only hope that they get enough government support, more funding, and better education in future so that they may discover what unpaid volunteers figured out on the Internet for free 3 months ago. Frankly it is shameful that the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science is not connected to the world wide web and has not trained staff to use “google”.

If humans are making a substantial addition to a ‘warming’ climate, then why has the temperature of the globe not changed in 15-17 years despite a massive increase in human CO² emissions over the same period?

How do the researchers reconcile human induced climate change (warming) based on Australian ‘weather’ over a few months of a year? Isn’t global warming a global ‘climate’ (30-year-cycle) issue?

These are mere basic scientific questions the Climate Commission should be using taxpayer funds to answer, not cherry-picking often UHI (Urban Heat Island) affected temp station data and suspect Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) temperature calculations to promote a Government climate agenda and massage an ideological climate bent.

•••

Mammalogist Tim Flannery is the head of Australia’s Climate Commission. For his $180,000, three day, part-time working week, he gets to make decisions that affect billions of dollars of Australian taxpayer’s hard-earned money: